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9/9/99: News? Nein! 296

Posted by Hemos from the this-amused-me-greatly dept.
SEWilco writes "As Slashdot readers know, today's date abbreviated as 9999 may cause problems in some older computers. So far only one report of a Tandy problem. 9s-day no problem in New Zealand and Hong Kong, Guam OK and USA still has electric power on 9/9/99. But seriously, folks, today is a big day for numerologists, pagans, and Nostradamus. So far today the NASA Near-Earth Object Program has not seen a comet coming to hit us. But what is so special about the Era of Alexandria 7491 anyway?"
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9/9/99: News? Nein! More

9/9/99: News? Nein!

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  • Yes, it is quite nice to see other techno-Pagans floating around :)

    Selena FireSinger
    -- Shadowcat
  • More to the point, no computer will represent today's date as 9999 internally. Two digits are needed for month and day, yes? So that would be 090999. And there's no "all 9's" magic quality to this number. This is truly a non-event from the code's point of view.



    I agree. If I absolutely had to encode a date as two bytes, I would have not used BCD as that would require three. Instead, I would have done the following:


    4 bits for the month (max num = 15)
    5 bits for the day (max num = 31)
    7 bits for the year (max num = 127)


    mmmmdddd dyyyyyyy

    And end-of-date field marker would thus be all ones in the bit field for a total hex value of $FFFF which would be a date value of 15/31/2029 which is nonsense and thus couldn't be confused with a date. On the other hand, this scheme would have a Y2K-like problem at year 2030, which is why I wouldn't use this scheme unless I absolutely had to such as in a small microcontroller with very limited RAM or something similar.
  • UNIX tracks the number of seconds since it's creation. Systems where a time_t is 32 bits will wrap around in 2038
  • Well, the utility company I work for picked today to have a "dress rehearsal" of their Y2K backup systems.

    Various conspiracy theorists around here suggested that it was just in case 9/9/99 was a real problem and they could blame it on the drill, but given that we've had no problems with either 9/9/99 or the drill, I'm not overly worried. :)
  • In the old days, when programs and data were punched on Hollerith cards and run on batch operating systems, an all 9s field was a popular way to mark the end of data. The problem was that a user's card deck was loaded into a card reader along with other people's jobs. This meant that there was no EOF from the card reader and a special sentinel card was needed to prevent the program from reading the next job as additional data. Even when Hollerith cards became obsolete, many mainframe programs still read/wrote card images from disk files. There are even microcomputer programs that still use card images because they were ported from an original mainframe program and the file formats were preserved to retain compatibility with existing data files.
  • The media is always going to come and predict the end of the world due to some computer problem. They wouldn't make any money if they predicted that everything was going to be fine...

    This is why there are things such as the CIAC... They are not trying to make money, they are providing a public service, and are often the best source of information on computer viruses and the like...
  • No, we're afraid that the bastards are going to shut our electricity off when they see their records indicating that we've missed payment on the last 10,000 monthly bills.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."

  • Re:- (Score:1)

    by jafac ( 1449 )
    "And hey, if Y2K doesn't end the world, you will
    be able to pick up great camping gear for next to
    nothing at garage sales!"

    That's what I've been counting on. . .

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • someone tell me where i can get the june-twenty-third-two-double-oh-one Patch and updates, because i need to make my UNIX box compliant!
    I've already cancelled my flights to Canada, and will drive to my june-twenty-third-two-double-oh-one shelter in Ontario! What do i need to stock for this catastrophy? Already bought my generators and year's worth of canned spam, macaroni and cheeze, and Whoppers! Anythign else i need?
  • 9/9/99, and MY computer's still working fi- ïF8-? j Pj j j v=veF¥?â-?â~=?t?Ti¦íÿ?ï?Ü?-Pö¦&ë&ëW
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    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • On the way to work this morning, I heard of a woman in Ohio or somewhere that was born at 9:09 on Sept 9th, 1900. That means at 9:09 on 9/9/99, she is 99. Freaky.
  • My phones were knocked out for 30 minutes this morning. ... and make sure I've got a years worth of gold bars in the basement.
    You don't need a year's worth of gold bars.
    You only need 30 minute's worth of gold bars.
  • I believe that the programmers who are responsible for the Y2K problems had the same idea... ie, by the time we get there, they won't be using this anymore...

    Just my $.02...
  • Well, to clarify, I live in a 200K city, the center of about a 1-million-person metro area. (Rochester, NY, to be exact.) I work for the utility company here; I used to work for a local hospital and a bank. Everything I've seen so far indicates that we're in good shape and that MOST people aren't going to be playing paranoid. This is all good. The biggest problem I'm having is with friends of mine who all want to throw their own parties and want EVERYone to show up to them. Yet another reason why I'm going to the Barony party -- it's the most neutral decision I can make. :)

    Then again, as I've posted before, the only marauding gang I've ever dealt with around here is the one that pushed my car out of a snowdrift for me. I've *seen* how this city pulls together in a crisis (very well), and I also know my way around here. So I'm going to "party like it's 999" with my SCA friends, though I *will* make sure I have a full tank of gas and that I take the same precautions that I do pre-expected-major-snowstorm.
  • There definitely have been real problems with the GPS rollover, and not just with cheap car units.

    My brother works for a local seaplane company, and about 9 of their GPS units quit working completely. These were all from one manufacturer - other units were fine. It's particularly annoying for them, because (being diligent and careful) they had specifically asked the manufacturer if the units were ok, and had been reassured that they were fine.

    It took several weeks to get them all fixed. (An expensive software upgrade was required, and it took days to get through the busy phone lines to the company.) In the meantime, the planes were flying without working GPS, which is apparently ok since the weather was good. If there had been a need for navigation by instruments only, that might have been a worse problem.

    Adding to the hassle, the software upgrade caused the units to forget all the named coordinate points that had been programmed into them. This will be hours of work to restore.

    They won't be buying from that instrument manufacturer any more.

    Don't underestimate the problems that these date issues can cause. Dates and times are the hardest fundamental data type to really handle correctly in software development, and are made worse by unpredictable users dealing with badly designed software.
  • While doing some Y2K work yeasterday, I ran across this little gem in a CA-IDEAL (Cobol style) program written in 1995.

    SET W-TIME = $TIME('HHMMSS')
    SET W-DATE = $DATE('YYMMDD')
    SET W-TODAYS-DATE = $STRING("19",W-DATE)

    Notice adding the string 19 to the 2 digit year to determine todays date. There was no other windowing logic. Ugly ugly ugly.

    -Scott__

  • ComEd, Y2k ... It's the End Of The World (not) (Score:3)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @04:37AM (#1693277)
    If you are in Chicago, it's just more of ComEd's crumbling infrastructure rearing its ugly head. I'm half-expecting complete outages by Y2K, but the bugs aren't going to be related to 01/01/00 -- they are a result of years of criminal negligence on the part of an underregulated power monopoly, the results of which are just now coming to fruition.

    Having said that, I am indeed skeptical of all of the "Y2K readiness" leaflets I receive in the mail. I suspect a good percentage of them are written from the standpoint of "we're not quite ready yet, but we will be, so let's sooth the unwashed masses." Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever written anything more than a trivially simple program realizes, deadlines have a way of slipping real fast in the world of software. I suspect there will be two major dangers resulting from the whole Y2k hoopla:

    1) People being stupid and panicky (as many others have mentioned already), cleaning out stores and what have you before Y2K arrives.

    2) People having done too little to prepare, trusting deceptive reassurances from those companies and services who weren't able to make their deadlines and be compliant on time, who then do an about face from blase' "it's nothin' to worry about" to full-fledged panic as they discover a whole host of inconveniences which combine to make their lives more than a little difficult.

    In both cases the danger will be a result of panicy people, not technology. But to dismiss the notion that one should be planning for contingencies invites a whole host of problems of its own, quite possibly making a touchy situation worse. The best approach IMHO is to take some reasonable precautions:

    * Have a little extra cash on hand in case the ATMs are down
    * Have a hard copy of your statement from a day or two before the new year on hand
    * Have a little extra food on hand (maybe a month's supply, instead of a week's)
    * Have a few candles lying around
    * Have a warm blanket handy in case the power does fail (thanks ComEd).
    * Have a good book or two, for the same reason
    * Relax. All those preparations were probably unnecessary, but now you don't have to worry even if things do come unravelled for a little while.

    If one has made reasonable contingencies, one won't be one of the idiots consumed by panic when we usher in the new year with a few bumps. Of course, don't go shooting your gun into the air new years eve. Not only could the bullets injure someone when they fall back to earth, but, more importantly, you'll probably need that ammo come January first. (For the humor impaired: the last comment was a joke!)
  • YYDDMM format is not a good format for computing. Generally, regardless of cultural format (I'm in the US, we use the completely scatterbrained Month/Day/Year format) stored format should be some variation on YYMMDD or YYYYMMDD. That way you can do comparisons and sorts on the dates, and have them come out right.

    ----
  • And in other news, computer experts are warning of the another date that is fast approaching: February First. Some computer programs may represent this date as FF which combined with a time such as Five Fifteen can be represented as FFFF. Such symbols are often used as "synching" signals in multimedia streams and it is feared that if such a date were stored in a multimedia file such as an "MP3" file, the sound would get distorted and ultimatly might make the computer speakers catch on fire.

    Bob Byte, a computer expert for High Tech Technologies, says that that Fs are used because of an obscure way of representing numbers called "hexidecimal". In the opinion of this reporter it is a short form of an error message consisting of swear words: f**k f**k f**k f**k.
  • This is good news. I always thought this one was likely to be a red herring. Does anyone think this bodes well for 1/1/00, or not ?

    Does anyone know of any data on how the GPS rollover went ? It can't have been too bad, or I'd have heard, but I heard Tokyo had traffic problems due to failed recievers.
  • Yes, the date is arbitrary. Look at the last link in the story to see what various calendars call today. 1999/9/9 happened a long time ago in some calendars (as did 2000 and 2001).

    Of course, the Christian calendar-challenged who worry about 2,000 years being significant should learn that Christ was probably born about four years before year 1, so actually 2,000 years of Christianity began three years ago...although others think He was born 33 years before year 1, and wonder whether His birth is as significant as His deaths.

    There's too much ambiguity...unless you simply stop counting years when you run out of rope for your Mayan calendar.

  • Just finished to read a bit outdated but still interesting and actuall poll from december 1998, here [nsf.gov] named "AMERICANS AND THE Y2K MILLENNIUM COMPUTERBUG"

    In the poll there was a question asking :
    "Will you withdraw all your money from the bank ?"
    16% told that they will ! And 31% told that they will "withdraw and set aside a large amount of cash "So i afaraid it can be a LOT MORE people rioting !

    The biggest danger to our society isn't from the actual Y2K problem, it's from the Y2K paranoia.

    Totally agree here, but.... writing this makes me thing if this what will happen (collapsing financial system due to the money withdrawal from the banks), maybe it's better to pull the money out of the bank before it's happenes ? ;-/

    Oblom
  • Is it the 9/9/99 bug?

    Whoops, it's solar and I had the panel covered with my hand.
  • It's soooo nice to see fellow earth children pop their heads up like prairie dogs whenever we are misrepresented.
    You all beat me to it. :-)
    Yes, it's a new moon, so where will I be? At band practice [homepage.com] with our new guitarist and new percussion guy! New beginnings, wee!
    Y2K riots will be fun to watch while astrally projecting myself over New York City. LOL

    The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
  • Every program I've ever written looks at
    the date to determine what to do next.

    It's very common.

    Textbooks have been written on the subject of
    date checking.

    Don't you just love the media.
    And the sheeple they feed.
  • it's based solely on a date system that revolves around some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in...

    Actually, it's based solely on a date system that revolves around when the mother of some Roman emperor or another thought some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in was born.

    Whew.
    --

  • Isn't it obvious? (Score:4)

    by vr ( 9777 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @12:36AM (#1693289)
    Obviously Sony must have used COBOL when coding for the Playstation 2.. see Playstation2 delayed [slashdot.org].

  • Re:This isn't Good news (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I woke up this morning to find my computer crashed, the sheets on my bed had flown onto the floor, all my clothes were no longer folded or hung up, the microwave was on fire, I tried calling the fire department and the phone was out, the tv would only pick up CSPAN, the radio was locked on country music station, and I went outside to find all four tires on my truck flat! Damn this bug! 1.1.00 is gonna be worse I bet!
  • i don't lump all christians as fundamentalists... Until i talk to someone, i try not to judge them. i have friends that are pagan, some are christian, etc.. I don't really care.

    i have noticed that the catholic religion as a whole seems to be aimed at the destruction of all other forms of thought though.....

  • just 1 per cent of people ... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    think about how many people are in the US alone, say 250 million (Probably more, but that was the last real number I heard), say 1 percent of those people are going to panic and riot on dec 31, that's 2.5 million people, say 100 thousand people in 25 major cities

    Hrrmmm boing ... this looks like "Make Money Fast" logic to me. Any very big number multiplied by 1 per cent still looks big. Why don't we assume that 1 per cent of the remaining 247.5 million people take to the streets to defend their property -- when the rioters saw that the odds were nearly equal, they'd soon give up. Or how about if we assumed that 1 per cent of people became nicer and more generous as a result of the scary experience. Or if 1 per cent of slashdot readers did a random act of kindness today. Or something.


    And getting rid of your social security number is not a brilliant idea which will make you exempt from Federal income tax.

    Oh yeh, and those Echelon keywords are a waste of space too.

    did I forget anything

    jsm

    PS sorry and all that.
  • Why would 9/9/99 be a problem for any computer? Why wasn't 8/8/88 a problem, or 7/7/77. And what's going to happen on 0/0/00? Seriously though, does anyone have a good explination for why 9/9/99 would cause a computer to have a cpu fart?
  • I posted this story weeks ago!

  • Let me share this with you. Today (9/9/99) I went to the dentist, to get a filling. From what I observed:

    • The door knob worked.
    • The lighting worked.
    • The Novocaine worked. (My favorite part)
    • The drill itself worked, but
    • The device that pumps water thru the drill did not work. I've never noticed this before, but then again it's been a few years since my last filling. It's also the first time I've seen (or heard of, for that matter) a doctor attempting to fix a peice of faultly equipment in the middle of an operation. (operation, n. 5. a surgical procedure aimed at restoring or improving the health of a patient So there.) And yes, there was water in the tank.

    So there is an example of 9/9/99 at work. Or an example of what happens when the janitorial staff accidently kicks the equipment. Either way.

    Richard Frost

    It's been a coulpe of hours now, and the Novocaine no longers works, and it hurts to open my mouth. Ow.

  • i remember hearing 280 million recently from a source that would re reliable but which i can not remember the name of. until hearing that 250 million was the number that i would have used as well.
  • Well.. there was some kind of power surge or something here where I am.. all the computers temporarily lost power, but they came right back up.

    Makes you wonder.. hmmm.. ;-)

  • An attempt to boost confidence (Score:5)

    by Robin Hood ( 1507 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @12:39AM (#1693299) Homepage
    Seems to me that these stories about "everything's O.K. on 9/9/99" are more than likely part of an attempt to boost people's confidence so there won't be massive panic in December 1999. See, if I were making Y2K contingency plans for, say, a bank (which, thankfully, I'm not) I would be much less worried about disruptions in electrical service, etc. and much more worried about people panicking. See, if people don't trust that their banks are going to be ready, they'll start withdrawing their money, and before you know it you could have a run on the bank. Remember that scene in Mary Poppins? Or the one in It's a Wonderful Life?? That's what worries me more than any disruptions in electrical service.

    So confidence-boosting articles are just fine by me! :-)
    -----
    New E-mail address! If I'm in your address book, please update it.

  • well we're already at 64bit with many chips, and even intel has it on their roadmap. actually intel has some in silicon now
  • Stock market's a workin'
    :)
  • ah.
    As a former SCA person myself (there really isn't much SCA activity in my area - so I basically dropped out when I moved here), I can say that SCA folks are probably best equipped to survive "the armageddon".

    They know how to camp - often not using modern equipment. They know how to survive by creating their own civilization out of the wilderness. They're well versed in fighting, and with weapons and techniques they also know how to fabricate, and are likely to have all the equipment they need to do both (fight, and fabricate weapons).

    And they know women who not only know how to sew, but LIKE to sew.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."

  • Ah, but I come from a small town where I have alot of family and friends. Approx. 7,000 people not exactly "the hills". I'm not talking about heading into the country. But a small community where you know everybody around you. Atleast I would feel safer in that type of environment. Even a good suburb where you know all your neighbors, isn't bad.

    So I do want to be in *A

    --

  • Two points:

    1) The MS NSA story was not an assertion, it reported a factual discovery made by a reputable security consultancy. At worst it made some reasonable, if provocative, speculations based on the facts known at the time. Microsoft's later response to the story was painfully emberrassing to any who read it, not to mention profoundly insulting to the reader's intelligence. They have unwittingly given the "NSA back door key theory" a huge boost in credibility, and would have been much better off keeping their mouths shut.

    2) A "trusted agency" is a single point of failure, capable of erring just like an individual, or being suborned by third parties for their own purposes. An industry wide consensus, or lack thereof (ie an open, ongoing debate), is a much better indicator of the veracity of a story than a single, offical stamp of approval. Neither approach is perfect, and certainly neither can substitute for a lazy reporter's lack of research, but the latter is much less subject to manipulation and/or outright corruption than the former IMHO.

  • So, I do want to be in A city just not a large metropolitan area.


    --

  • My time reversal experiments are going much
    slower now.
  • It's my birthday today.. and these

    Was born in 77
    Today I'm turning 22, on 9-9-99.

    Heh.


  • There's a traffic chaos in downtown Oslo, because the signal lights only display red, according to the reports in my local radio.

    The subways also experience problems.

    I sat at the computer lab, as the power went out today, at 15:13, and left a server down.

    Probably just a coincidence..?

  • The article for this thread was "Posted by Hemos on Thu Sep 09, '99 08:30 AM CDT"

    For the archive readers in the future who look at this after the problem has been corrected, as near as I can figure it this reply will be displayed as having been posted about 7:03 AM CDT. In about an hour and a half Hemos will post the article to which I am replying.

    It's not a 9/9/99 problem, but any time problem in this discussion is may be... moderated Funny?

  • If you stand on your head, 999 becomes 666. Now #9 point above has a whole new meaning. Just something else stupid for us to ponder.
    Life sucks, then you die.

  • That's when all of Microsoft's product go KABOOOMM!!!!
  • AFAIK everything went fine, at least as far as aviators are concerned. My Lawrance worked fine all the way through the "rollover" and the upgrade.

    I did have the GPS go out on me for ten or fifteen minutes one night flying back to Chicago along the Indiana shoreline. A quick look at the satelite page revealed the Satelites in an unusual constellation -- a bunch of them were all lined up in a row! Once the satelites were out of alignment with one another the GPS found itself and continued to work just fine.

    This is an example as to why one NEVER relies on a single instrument for navigational and situational awareness (unless it simply can't be helped) -- cross checking your GPS against your LORAN, VORs, and MARK I eyeballs (is that river outside where the GPS and LORAN say it should be?) is the only way to be certain you are where you think you are.

    Ob Y2K: If even a fraction of the banks and other firms are even half as dishonest and non-forthright about their Y2K readiness and infrastructure as Commonwealth Eddison has been this summer (not even bothering to tell the proper authorities after their efforts to fix serious problems on the sly failed and resulted in a huge power outage downtown, for example, coupled with numerious, ongoing power outages throughout the city which show no sign of letting up as their neglected infrastructure continues to show its age), then the Y2K issue could well end up being more than just a little hiccup. Armageddon? No. A royal pain in the ass, bigger than most expect? Quite possibly.
  • Woo, amazing!

    I bet this is even more amazing: Shortly after my 3rd birthday, there was a point when I was exactly pi years old! Now THAT's amazing, especially considering that pi is an irrational number! Maybe that's why I'm an irrational person.

    In fact now that I'm 31, some time in January I was exactly 10*pi years old! Wow!!!!!

    Did anyone out there celebrate being n*e years old?

  • Rochester, I liked the town when I was there on business. I really like the Empire Brewery. Damn fine stout.

    I live in St. Louis, Mo (2.5 million). I've only lived here 2 years, and would feel much safer in the town I grew up in, in Nebraska(pop. 6,639). Still, I will probably be in St. Louis on 12.31.99, and I'm not really worried, but I would feel safer somewhere that I lived for 18 years.


    --

  • The line is a direct answer to "Americans will use any excuse to riot...". On the other hand, it could be moderated down as "Bad spelling". But then afain there is no such an option.

    As for the post, its is not the europeans, but the English that are more prone to riot, mostly during soccer games (so we know where the Americans got the idea, right?).
  • That's not a half bad idea Shadowcat, I've got some workings of my own that would be well suited for a new moon. And I'd love to check out your site, but apparently my job's SurfWatch won't let me. :(
  • I work at an ISP, and since about 9:00 AM, most of our routers have been freaking out. We've already had to reset a couple of the internal switches, and some of the reouters as well. I'm not convinced that the problems with the routers and switches are related to 9999, but it's a kinda funny, no?
  • It wasn't John Lennon chanting, it was a tape loop made from an Abby Road studios test tape of some sorts... just lettin' ya know.
  • No, tomorrow night will mark the change between 5759 and 5760.

    Easy way to remember this - the last digit of the gregorian year is the same as the jewish year for most of the year (9-10 months out of 12)

    240 years + about 28 hours Eastern time as the time of this post.
  • As I opened my eyes this morning, I realized there was a suttle difference from most mornings. There was no Red glow coming from my alarm clock. Looking out the window at 5:30 this morning, the whole neighborhood was dark.

    Immediately it clicked, "oh man, its 9999, and I'm low on canned goods". Phone still worked, so I called Southern California Edison. The recording said there was a wide-spread blackout in my area. I started having visions of looters and scenes from the movie "The Trigger Effect".

    At 7:30, the power came back on. No word from SCE, but I had since fired up my laptop, and discovered all the "9/9/99 came and went" stories, so it wasn't a surprise.

    Still spooked me, even though I'm a programmer, and know it SHOULDN'T cause a problem, I was convinced it had.

  • Yeah I just wasn't thinking long enough to come up with a YYMMDD format idea ;> Long day, trying to work round bugs in activex controls and HTML and so on

    Even so, what I was meaning (hah!) was that if there was no zero stringy thingy, then if you did Year/Month/Day, what day is 1999112 - the 12th of January or the 2nd of November, sort of thing. So it would seem insane to not zero-pad.

    I'm absolutely sure I'm missing something though, I just don't know what :(

    "When something seems to easy, it usually is"
  • Just over 240, ya mean. :)

    ** This post has been certified to be Year 5760 Compliant **



    "I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."
  • You have to have four 9's in a row though.

    Minor correction to my previous post. The year would have to be BCD encoded (99), the month would have to be regular hex encoded (1-C) otherwise you'd need a second digit to encode Oct-Dec, and the day could be either, since 09 is 09. It's contorted, either way you look at it.
  • Christianity isn't a religion. Roman Catholisim, Anglicanism etc are, but AFAIK, there is no "Christian Church"
  • Just this day ...
    9-9-'99, and the Dutchmen (those guys from Holland, Europe) took an entire day to test there computer systems for year 2k resistant.
    The public services were no longer reachable so it seams the test failed, ... COOL


    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
    Belgium HyperBanner
    http://belgium.hyperbanner.net
  • I think he's in the studio . . .

    yes, yes,

  • I think he's in the studio . . .



    yes, yes,



  • There has been quiet reports that Carin auto navigation units have been affected by the 1024 week rollover bug. The only problem is that the initial acquisition of visible satellites has gone from the normal 20-40 seconds to a period of 5-10 minutes. This means people are driving around for a while entirely on inertial guidance.

    The technical explanation had something to do with pre-calculating positions based on an almanac of known positions based on picking up the intial time signal from the strongest satellite. If you know which week & day & minute etc, you can make a quick pre-calc of where some satellites are supposed to be, saving you a bunch of time sorting out the signals. But the Carin's have the 1024 bug and the cheap-o GPS receiver eventually times out on the pre-calc and does a full calc of the positions.

    A friend reports this as extremely annoying but still usable. He says when he complained his car dealership has asked him to come by for a free retrofit of the main unit in about 8 weeks, since they have been asked to replace all their installed units but to start with people complaining. I think these are made by Phillips in the netherlands or germany, so I don't know if any are in the U.S.

    the AC
    [obOnTopic: no, I haven't seen any 9/9/99 bugs today, but I'm about to get on an airplane in a blind show of faith :-) ]
  • An AC wrote:

    More to the point, no computer will represent today's date as 9999 internally. Two digits are needed for month and day, yes? So that would be 090999. And there's no "all 9's" magic quality to this number. This is truly a non-event from the code's point of view.

    It's not the representation, but the input pattern that's of concern. I personally worked at one place where we were told -- for accounts that were never supposed to "come due" -- to just put in "9 9 99" for the due date. The software converts this internally to 090999 of course. But the point is, the accounts still (assuming they're still using this system) come due today, regardless of how it's represented internally.

    The whole "end-of-file marker" thing was a big bunch of FUD, but accounting "shortcuts" like this could indeed cause headaches.

    And don't say "but nobody would be that dumb." I had a boss who drove the accountant nuts one month. We mis-billed a bunch of credit cards (~1000 or so), ran the credits back when we found out, and then re-billed correctly. So my boss "helpfully" deleted the original invoices and credits and replaced them with the corrected invoices and credits. (Accountants in the audience may now proceed to the front for a stiff shot of whiskey. Move slowly to avoid sudden collapse...)

  • Look people. You don't need to comment on the moderators in the discussion. The moderators are randomly selected users like you and me. As far as one person's reply mentioning Andover, they have nothing to do with it. Now there is meta moderation, and if the meta moderators (again, you and me) don't like how it is moderated, the one who moderated will be moderated down. Now stop whining.

  • Re:Maybe I'm just dumb but... (Score:3)

    by Enry ( 630 ) <enry@@@wayga...net> on Thursday September 09, 1999 @12:39AM (#1693365) Journal
    Apparently 9999 was used instead of an EOF marker. If the software came across it, it would assume that there was no more data after it.

  • Har! (Score:4)

    by Pike ( 52876 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @12:40AM (#1693367) Journal
    A computer program would not store todays date as 9999, but as 090999, with two digits for month and day. There may be variations on this, but in almost no case would the computer look at today's date and see the value 9,999, and of course flat-ASCII should have no problems at all.

    I think this one is a dud; I don't know how it slipped past the "experts".

  • Just paranoia.... (Score:3)

    by shri ( 17709 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .cmarirhs.> on Thursday September 09, 1999 @12:40AM (#1693369) Homepage
    We were out partying last night in Hong Kong (well past mid-night) and one of my buddies who is a senior cop threatened to "get medieval" on the bartender if the Carlsberg tap stopped functioning after midnight, when he was planning on joining us.

    He told us that 28,000 cops were deployed last night here in HK. During one of their planning meetings he had mentioned to his supervisors that he thought this was just general paranioa. "Sir, I have never heard of a computer nicking a criminal".

  • You guys are just throwing out numbers and percentages without any constraint on bias.

    Admit that you pulled the "1% of americans will
    riot" idea out of your ass.

    Now the "withdraw all your money from banks?"
    Well, these are Americans we're talking about.
    They have $485.17 in the bank. They withdraw
    it ALL every two weeks, a day or two before payday.

    Way more than your bogus percentage
    have less than two weeks reserve of money
    in the bank.

    If you were trying to come up with some useless
    made up statistic for those with more than a certain amount of money in the bank, you should
    have said so.
  • The following is the response I got from the author of the article. Nice to see she can admit when she's wrong.

    ----------------------------------------------

    Hi, You are absolutely right and I should have been careful before speaking
    generically about pagans. You are not the only pagan I've heard from today.

    I'm sorry and will do better next time. Michelle
    > ----------
    > From: The CyberGoddess
    > Sent: Thursday, September 09, 1999 8:01 AM
    > To: mquinn@sjmercury.com
    > Subject: Your article
    >
    > said Jack Elder, a psychic reader at The Psychic Eye Bookstore in San
    > Francisco. ``It's kind of a power moment. A lot of things could
    > happen.''>>
    >
    > As an avid internet user and a staunch fighter for Pagan rights and
    > understanding, I feel it necessary to clear up this misconception.
    >
    > Either this person is not a Pagan or is just trying to give you something
    > you can use in your article. Pagans, in general, do not follow the solar
    > calendar. The calendar used for basic time telling was developed by
    > Christians and revolves around the premise of Christ's birth, an event
    > which
    > holds no significance in most Pagan faiths. While 9 is indeed a special
    > number, only flaky New Agers, wannabes or psychic readers would hold
    > 9/9/99
    > as a "power date". Pagan holidays are actually lunar in nature. The only
    > significance today holds is the New Moon tonight which is a symbol of new
    > beginnings. The date does not affect us in the least. The mundane
    > calendar
    > is just that... mundane.
    >
    > Remember, one person claiming to be Pagan does not make up the Pagan
    > community. Before you post a broad generalization such as the one made,
    > please check with several sources to verify the information you've been
    > given. It generally will prevent you from a barrage of angry people
    > wanting
    > to know why you misrepresented them in the public eye.
    >
    > Selena FireSinger
    > National Co-director and Pennsylvania Contact, Pagans in Action Council
    > for
    > Truth - P.A.C.T.
    > PA P.A.C.T. Website - www.cybergoddess.net/pact.html
    > Sacred Earth Alliance Representative
    > Sponsor, The Witches' Voice - www.witchvox.com
    > Webmistress for Witches Against Religious Discrimination - W.A.R.D.
    > Member of Witches' Anti-Discrimination League - W.A.D.L.
    > Member of Summerland Grove Pagan Church, Memphis, TN
    > Member of Sylverwood Circle, Memphis, TN
    > http://www.pagans.org/~selena




    -- Shadowcat

  • Pagans? (Score:2)

    by Tet ( 2721 )
    today is a big day for numerologists, pagans, and Nostradamus.

    Few of the pagans I know (including myself :-) would be seen dead having anything to do with numerology. Today has no real pagan significance. I was discussing it with a friend last night -- it's based solely on a date system that revolves around some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in...

  • The proplem would most likely be with old ("legacy") software. Most likely old mainframe and minicomputer COBOL code where dates were stored as BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) with one digit per byte -- not the more "modern" integer data types. People are most likey thinking of practices such as using the digits 999 or 9999 as an end-of-file marker to tell a program "that's the end of the data, you can stop reading the input file now."

    A program this old may have originally taken it's input from punched cards, and the "input-file" may have been a card reader.

    I know there's a *lot* of old COBOL code still in use, that programmers often don't like to learn new ways, and probably aren't given time to clean-up working code, but Please! -- I would just be amazed if this causes any serious problems.

    I would be even more amazed if it did and that company told the public.

  • 9999 was supposedly used as an 'end of data' signifier - especially for data entry programs, which would loop (asking for more data) until a '9999' was entered. So when today's date rolls around the program could interpret it a signal to end. I don't know how many 'production' programs actually used this but I have text books with coding examples that do. I would have thought that a production system would have been a little 'smarter' than using 9's.
  • Some poorly written programms used 9/9/99 as an indicator that there was no date. Of course, they'd have unpredictable problems today.

    Some old systems used the text string "9999" as an end of file marker, and if a program on such a system was written badly enough to not zero pad the day and month, the date would be read as end of file. Any sane programmer would store today at least as "990909", the ANSI recommendation for date storage has for many years been "1999.09.09".

    ----

  • Drivers wrongly came to the conclusion that moderators are just randomly selected, normal users like you and me.

    You fail to see my son. Though your small mind, at least compared to my genetically enhanced one, may not grasp the situation, I do. A normal user of Slashdot is a fair (not of complexion mind you), competant (well, competant if they don't try to interact with the outside world), and generally intellegent individual(with some exceptions). When they are picked to be one of the few however, they become evil human beings. They lie, they bitch, some even start using NT in mission critical applications! Their lives become utterly centered around their incredible power, their power to control the great force know as /.

    This can happend to anyone. Your best friend could suffer from Moderationous Powrus as we speak. Maybe you mother, your father, or even YOU. Symptoms Include:

    Constant and maybe even excessive reading of Slashdot.

    The growing of a short goatee, and maniacal laughing.

    They're favorite topic of conversation changes to "The many possibilities of being dictator and wordly god of the Earth"

    Please, if you notice these symptoms apearing in a family member, a loved one, or an aquatance. You must imediately lock them in a closet devoid of any meens through which they could communicate with the outside world. Including windows, phone jacks, cable lines, power outlets, and musical instruments. People generally recover after 3 days or when ever their moderation points expire. This is a serious problem, and should not be taken lightly.

  • The media are listening to us (Score:3)

    by SteveX ( 5640 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @12:48AM (#1693415) Homepage
    The media are believing all the supposed computer "experts" that are coming to them and saying "oh my God the world is going to end".

    Look at the Microsoft NSA story. Someone sees the NSA symbol in MS code, makes an assumption, and the media buys it hook line and sinker. But almost every media article quotes some "expert" as saying that it's a real - the media guys don't want to say that themselves. That way, when it turns out to be bogus, they're clean.

    I think we could use some sort of trusted agency that would verify computer-related or security-related news stories. Actually we have this in the CIAC and similar agencies don't we? If a CNN story quotes the CIAC, and not "Security Expert Bob Fishpond from Funny Creek, Missouri" then I'd be a lot more likely to believe it.



  • On 6/6/66, I was little, I didn't know shit, and by

    7/7/77, eleven years later still don't know any better

    on 8/8/88, it's way too late for me to change

    and by 9/9/99, I hope I'm sittin' on the back porch drinking red wine, singing

    oooooooooh, french fries with pepper!
    -- Mark Sandman, 1963 - 1999



    I'm celebrating the way he would have wanted it!
    --

  • On the other hand, it could be moderated down as "Bad spelling". But then afain there is no such an option.
    Well there you go again, assuming I'm speaking english. - note: that was supposed to be funny
  • Its called Binary Coded Decimal or BCD. You use four bits to encode each decimal digit, not a byte - although people may do that too, but if you did that you could just use ASCII.

    You can use ordinary binary arithemtic to do BCD arithmetic, but you have to add fudge factors to get it right.

    Its used in accountancy applications because you know how many digits accuracy you have, and can use decimal rounding conventions etc. I think it probably matters legally.

    The first versions of BASIC used BCD, since its less likely to produce 2 + 2 = 3.9999999 in the
    way certain BASICS that used floating point sometimes did.

  • 9/9/99 Not Totally Overrated (Score:4)

    by Phil Gregory ( 1042 ) <phil_g+slashdot@pobox.com> on Thursday September 09, 1999 @12:50AM (#1693424) Homepage

    I've seen quite a bit of discussion about this on the MIDRANGE-L mailing list, and so I thought I'd mention a few things. A lot of people seem to think that 9/9/99 as a special date is mostly myth, largely because the computer would store it as 090999, which doesn't look as special. Surely 99/99/99 would be better. Other people pointed out that this sort of thing tended to crop up when the users wanted to add extra information in a field the programmer thought would only be a date. In such a program, 99/99/99 would fail because it was an invalid date, so creative users might be tempted to use a vaild date, but give it special meaning. Two common dates for things like "no expiration" or "not applicable" were 12/31/99 and 9/9/99. The former would be the highest date that could be entered in a two-digit year field, while the latter was easy to remember, yet still a good ways into the future.

    9/9/99 problems are likely to be fairly rare, since the necessary circumstances would be somewhat rare, and, hopefully, many such problems have been caught by now. Where today's date does cause problems will likely not be noticed by the population at large. (i.e. no power outages, no broken ATMs.) At a guess, the most likely candidates for problems will be billing software running on older mainframs and midrange computers, and I'm sure the companies will do their utmost to bill you for anything you might owe them.


    --Phil (I know the banks with my loans have been quite diligent.)

  • We're much more likely to see problems caused by idiots rather than computers. Think about what's probally already started happening. People are going to be buying more canned goods and other non-perishables. People are going to buy bomb shelters and take their money out of banks. Banks are going to go under, food prices will sky-rocket, as will any other materials used in a bomb shelter. Then guess what happens when jan 1st rolls around and the world hasn't exploded? Well with all of those non-perishables people aren't going to buy food, especially due to the increased prices because of the limited supply the day before. People aren't going to trust the banks with their money, after all, many went under because they weren't Y2K (read: moron) compliant.

    Oh and we can't forget the inevitable rioting that's going to occur. Americans will use any excuse to riot. Your favorite team lost the world series, riot. Your favorite team won the world series, riot. Y2K aka armagedon is here, riot.

    God bless morons one and all...

  • Newsflash!!!! (Score:4)

    by Croaker ( 10633 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @12:56AM (#1693433)
    Computer experts have just determined that, after extensive testing, that the date 5/23/2001 will only occur once. "No computers have ever encountered such a date before," a noted computer expert said. "Who knows if they will work when they encounter it."

    Already, several major firms have been created to certify systems an 5-23-01 ready. "People are urged to ensure that their banks, hospitals, and every other business they deal with are ready for this unprecidented event."

  • 93

    Actually most Pagans don't use numerology...in fact, I would say that more Christians and Jews do so.

    As well, Paganism, being a recognized form of religion deserves to be Captialized when mentioned, just like Christianity or Judaism.

    Most numerology is based up the Jewish holy books and the Kabbala. Christianity borrowed from the Jews (like they did most things) and created Christian Kabbala. In the late 19th and early 20th century, groups like The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn did a great deal of research and various members published a number of books that are considered some of the best references today.

    One of the formost writers on the subject was Aliester Crowley.

    93/93

    ttyl
    Farrell J. McGovern, Druid
    Silver Fox Grove, ADF
    Pagan for nearly 20 years.

  • Re:Har! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, this was a legit issue in some legacy code we had to fix. Seems that there was a binary searched table that was loaded at startup and sorted, a dummy entry of 09/09/99 was put in at the end of the table as the last record because there had been a bug in an older compiler version (Cobol II - OS/MVS) that caused the progream to never find the last entry in the table, so the programmer worked around this by always putting a "bogus" entry as the last record. Since the code is now COBOL-370 and the compiler is no longer an issue, we took it out. Had we missed it, anyone who had a service change on 09/09/99 would have gotten their bill this month in Idaho.

  • Bill Gates just took over After Y2K (Score:3)

    by Matter Eating Lad ( 66251 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @01:09AM (#1693457)
    There has been a major event on 9/9/99, ... the evil Bill gates cartoon just took over After Y2K! [after-y2k.com] Help us Nitrozac, you're our only hope!
  • Well accually I thought europeans were more prone to riot during sport games.
  • The "all nines" convention was to deal with hardware limitations; some devices wouldn't signal end of file, or worse, would abort if you read past the last record. Using nines as EOF gave a safe, platform independent way to handle the problem.

    But as others as pointed out, Sept. 9 is 090999 and should not cause a problem.

    Old COBOL programmer
  • The Ancient Greeks (pagan) were also heavily into numerology, Pythagoras and his followers in particular. Many neopagan religions are based at least in part on the Greeks.

    From what I understand, the Mayans were also very big on numerology.

    ----
  • Little known fact: Revolution 9 was by Paul and Linda, who were trying to be trendy and avant-garde, not John and Yoko, who were living in a nice cottage in the countryside.
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

  • 9 Ways (Score:4)

    by meersan ( 26609 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @01:27AM (#1693480) Homepage
    9 Ways 9/9/99 Turned Out to Be a Bummer

    9) Antichrist crashed party, demanded blood sacrifices to the Satan-spawn of Baal.
    8) Panicing day-traders fleeing the inflationary wrath of Alan Greenspan caused a run on the dollar
    7) Today's date actually expressed as 090999, thus disappointing a bunch of Y2K nuts hoping for a warm-up
    6) Ricky Martin stole the MTV video award from Weird Al Yankovic, thanks to shameless ballot stuffing
    5) Stayed at home working on computer to avoid superstitious fanatics, motherboard overheated, magic smoke came out. :(
    4) Spilled hemlock all over myself at the coven swap-meet
    3) "friends" is a re-run tonight
    2) Couldn't play the new Dreamcast due to nuclear melt-down of national electric grid
    1) That darn asteroid!

  • Odd users and old databases (Score:3)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @01:52AM (#1693488) Homepage Journal
    While most posters have ballyhooed the 9-9-99 'bug', I have to relate the problem a company I have worked for ran into. They still use an document database running on an ancient 386. During Y2k testing for the 9/9/99 bug, the in-house server software that allows users to access the database remotely started to intermittantly dump. A bunch of the IS people sat down to discuss replacement / rollback / recode. While mulling over the possibility of rollback, one of the passing users chimed in. "You guys can't mess with the date, it would screw up our age number." There wasn't an age field. They made her show them. Some of the users were filling in the l_date field, intended for lease-end date, with the date the master lease became effective. As a result, a field that indicated days until lease end had a large negative number. When they had set the date to September 8th, one of the leases signed back in '82 managed to hit -9999 days until termination. Unfortunatly, when the machine rolled to the 9th, the field hit -10000, and it would no longer fit into the five char string. Every time someone looked at that particular lease, (which was often enough) the machine segfaulted.

    The users were punished.
  • The place where this is going to be a big deal is in billing. Sure, today's not a big deal: everyone you're printing an invoice for was billed on 9/8. You're not going to notice that you missed 3 bills that should have printed after midnight. But tomorrow, when you should have 75 bills printed and you get none, you'll notice.

    As for the "the date would be stored as 09/09/99" argument: You mean your integer reading functions don't strip the leading 0? That's interesting, and possibly useful, but possibly braindead also.

    The "9/9/99" sentinel is NOT that old. They were teching us to use that in school less than 7 years ago.

    I think there's a little backlash by younger computer people here. "Those old people" lacked the "vision" needed to plan for their programs to be in active use in 1999 or 2000. Get real. I'm not an old computer programmer, and I was taught that 9/9/99 was a good value to use, and I've seen several programs use it.

  • Highvalues? (Score:3)

    by yorkie ( 30130 ) on Thursday September 09, 1999 @01:56AM (#1693501)
    I studied COBOL in the mid 80's.

    Some variables could only store numerical values, which were defined as a number of numeric digits, presumably using BCD as the internal storage value. It was necessary to use magic numbers to indicate special conditions, such as EOF or no more records. Since most files were indexed sequentially, all 9s was often used as special EOF indicator since it would always be sorted last.

    However, by the mid 1980s, COBOL introduced a special value, HIGHVALUES, to which any numerical variable could be assigned, which was always higher than all 9s, and was to be recommended for such magic numbers. I think there was an equivalent LOWVALUES as well.

    I do not know when these to keywords were introduced, but it was at least 15 years ago.

    If 9/9/99 is a problem with COBOL, it must be using a very old variant of the language.
  • Dunno about that capitalizing "paganism". Unlike Christianity or Judaism, it's not a specific form of religion. Certainly, Druidism, Wicca, Discordianism, and so on should be capitalized, but paganism isn't a religion, it's a term that describes a set of religions. Capitalizing it would be kind of like capitalizing "monotheism".

    John Campbell, Agnostic Discordian
    Coaxial Cabal
    Sorta kinda pagan for a while now.
  • Funny, that. This is exactly why I *want* to be in a big city on 01-01-00. Well, a moderately big city, ie the one I live in. :)

    There are going to be stupid people, sure, but the ones I'm especially worried about are the ones who are doing the whole head-for-the-hills thing. The survivalist nutcases won't be in the cities, and the biggest problem I'm likely to encounter is a bunch of drunks who partied a little too hard. And given that I fully intend to be at my Barony's New Year's party, there will be plenty of candles around, camping gear if there's a REAL problem, and lots of live steel should THAT become necessary.

    I'd much rather deal with the drunks than with the sober gun-nuts who will be lining every spare scrap of country on the big day. :P
  • From what I understand (and I bet I'm wrong) people used to store
    9999 as the end of file marker. And people are thinking that dates will be stored the same way? Or was EOF 9/9/99, which would just be blindingly stupid (why use a totally unnecessary slash when you can zero-pad the string - at worst you lose nothing, at best you save two bytes)

    So surely if it was just 9999 at the end of a file, dates would be handled a different way (consider 99111 - 1st of November or 11th of January?)

    I could be totally mistaken here, I just don't get what the problem is supposed to be

    -- Andy
    (feeling very clueless today)
  • No, since the first 9/9/99 order would have kicked it off. The other time it would have kicked off is at the end of the day, when records get checked, etc.

    Since that didn't happen, it's safe to say we're okay.
  • If the computers would interpret the numbers with just characters, then it'd be ordered as 090999 rather than 9999 which means nothing. This was never an issue... just media hoopla.

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